Which Colleges Actually Read Recommendation Letters — 27 Rate Them Very Important, 11 Never Open Them (2026)

Teachers are getting recommendation requests this month, and students are agonizing over which two to ask. Before you agonize, check whether the schools on your list read them. Eleven of the 73 we read — including every University of California campus, the University of Washington, Illinois, Penn State, and Michigan State — mark recommendations "not considered."

What the schools say

Section C7 of the Common Data Set asks each college to rate recommendations: very important, important, considered, not considered. Across the 73 filings we have read for the 2024–25 and 2025–26 cycles: 27 very important, 22 important, 13 considered, 11 not considered.

Recommendations are the fourth most-split factor on the form. Nearly four schools in ten rate them at the top; one in seven does not read them at all.

The 27 that rate them very important

Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Washington University in St. Louis, USC, Tufts, UNC, Northeastern, Caltech, Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Haverford, Harvey Mudd, and LSU.

This is nearly the full roster of selective private universities and colleges, plus UNC and LSU among publics. If your list is heavy with these, the two letters are among the four or five inputs the school has said it weighs most.

The 11 that do not read them

Every University of California campus we read — Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara, Riverside — plus the University of Washington, Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Penn State, Michigan State, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The UC application does not accept them from applicants at all (Berkeley invites a small number of applicants to submit letters later, after a first read). Large publics reading tens of thousands of files cannot weigh a document that varies in quality with the writer more than the student. If your list is entirely California and Big Ten publics, the letters are not a factor at all.

The middle: 35 schools

Twenty-two rate recommendations important and 13 considered. Emory, Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan, Virginia, Boston College, Wake Forest, and most of the liberal arts colleges sit here — a real input, not a decisive one.

What this changes about who you ask

At a very-important school, the letter is read as evidence about you that the transcript cannot supply: how you think, how you treat other people, what you do when a problem is hard. That argues for the teacher who knows you, not the teacher who gave you the highest grade. A generic letter from an AP teacher who cannot remember your name is worth less than a specific one from a sophomore-year teacher who can.

At a not-considered school, ask nobody on their account. If the same teacher is writing for your Penn application, the letter simply travels; you do not need a separate one for Berkeley, because Berkeley will not open it.

Why the split is so wide

Recommendations are expensive to read well and impossible to standardize. A school reading 6,000 files can spend time on two letters per file; a school reading 130,000 cannot, and any factor that cannot be read consistently across that many files is a factor the school will stop weighing. That is why the not-considered list is publics with huge applicant pools and the very-important list is privates with small ones. The rating tracks the reading budget, not the school's opinion of teachers.

The counselor letter is different

The C7 row covers teacher and counselor recommendations together, but they do different work. The counselor letter is where your high school's context lives — how it ranks, how it grades, what a 3.9 means there. At schools that rate class rank or rigor very important, that context is load-bearing even if the row says "considered." Make sure your counselor has what they need by mid-October; the teacher letters can follow.

One practical consequence for Early Decision

Binding applications are due November 1. Teachers writing letters for a dozen students in October will not rewrite one on short notice. If your ED school rates recommendations very important — Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Rice and most of the others in our binding-round data do — the request needs to be in this week, not the week of the deadline.

The two-teacher question, answered by the table

Most selective schools ask for two teacher letters, usually one from a STEM subject and one from humanities. At a very-important school, choose the two teachers who have seen you work through something hard — that is what the reader is looking for. At a considered school, the same two letters are fine. At a not-considered school, the question does not arise. Pick once, for the schools that read them, and let the letters travel.

Where the numbers come from

Every rating is from section C7 of the named school's Common Data Set, 2024–25 or 2025–26 cycle, read from the school's own published filing. Counts are over the 73 filings we have read on those cycles. Each school page on PrepToDone shows its recommendation rating with the filing year and source link.

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